Browsing Posts published in September, 2007

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor of Encyclopædia Britannica, for which he writes regularly on world geography, culture, and other topics. McNamee is also the author of many articles and books, includingBlue Mountains Far Away: Journeys into the American Wilderness (2000), and editor of The Desert Reader: A Literary Companion (2002). As a guest writer for Advocacy for Animals, he writes this week on the increasing frequency of encounters between humans and snakes—and of snakebites—in the United States.

Pity Christina Ryan, a young woman from Tennessee competing in the 2007 Mrs. America competition in Tucson, Ariz. Out for a nighttime stroll at the resort where she was staying, Ms. Ryan skipped aside to avoid a spider in her path. Regrettably, that sideways skip landed her directly atop a western diamondback rattlesnake, which responded by biting her on her right foot. “Once I turned and saw the rattlesnake, I was totally hysterical,” she told a reporter from the Associated Press. “Mrs. Iowa pulled [the fang the rattler left behind] out of my foot. Mrs. Wisconsin called 911.” Undeterred, Ms. Ryan was back in competition 15 hours in the hospital and 10 vials of antivenin later. continue reading…

A Progress Report

The guest writer for Advocacy for Animals this week, Kara Rogers, is Britannica’s life sciences editor. She holds a Ph.D. in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of Arizona, where her research focused on understanding the role of antioxidants in mitochondria. Rogers has written for various publications on topics ranging from current medical research and eugenics to parasitic and vector-borne diseases.

The use of animals to better understand human anatomy and human disease is a centuries-old practice. Animal research has provided valuable information about many physiological processes that are relevant to humans and has been fundamental in the development of many drugs, including vaccines, anesthetics, and antibiotics. Animals and humans are similar in many ways. Animal behaviour can be as complex as human behaviour, and the cellular structures, proteins, and genes of humans and animals are so similar that the prospect of using animal tissues to replace diseased human tissues is under intense investigation for patients who would otherwise never receive a potentially life-saving transplant. continue reading…

People who are sympathetic to the notion of animal rights, and who therefore oppose the use of animals by humans for food, clothing, research, recreation, or entertainment, often defend their view by appealing to the suffering of the animals involved, claiming that it is not worth the comparatively small benefits accruing to humans from these practices.

This is roughly the argument made by many people who protest the industrial-scale slaughter of animals in factory farms, for example. Others take the view that animals (or at least the “higher” animals) have genuine rights, comparable or equivalent to those of humans, which are violated when humans use animals in any of these ways. These rights may include the right to life (or the right not to be killed unjustly), the right not to be tormented, the right to engage in natural behaviors, and, depending on the capacities of the animal, the right to some measure of freedom. According to this view, the benefits to humans that derive from the most common uses of animals are irrelevant, since rights by definition are absolute, or valid in all circumstances, and more important than any consideration of consequences. continue reading…

The demand for products made from the body parts of bears in Asia and in North America has resulted in the poaching of bears and in the establishment of “farms” for the extraction of bile from live bears. On these farms the animals are kept captive in small cages; bile is extracted from the bears’ gallbladders multiple times daily, through holes in their abdomens that are kept open. The World Society for the Protection of Animals estimates that at least 12,000 bears are kept on bear farms in China, Korea and Vietnam. This week, Advocacy for Animals welcomes guest writer Adam M. Roberts, vice-president of Born Free USA and chair of the Species Survival Network’s Bear Working Group.

Customs officials in the Russian Far East confiscate hundreds of bear paws of both black and brown bears. Bear carcasses are found in British Columbia, with the gallbladders and paws removed. California businesses are raided and the owners fined for selling products containing bear bile. And in China, live bears languish in cages so small they can barely move, where they spend their entire lives cruelly “milked” for their bile.

The global trade in bear parts—especially gallbladders and bile and the products made from them—is widespread and complex and puts various bear species at risk. There is an unwieldy, intricate worldwide web of smuggling that leads to the unnecessary slaughter of bears for profit. continue reading…

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.